The widow fears a coup

Did Kirchnerismo and the Argentinian opposition both betray their social ideals? An analysis of Latin American left populism (as well as the opposition movements) from a left wing perspective.

Argentines watch a football game in Buenos Aires. Demotix/FitoKeller. All rights reserved.

What I first noticed from the car window on the way
from the airport, aside from beautiful green fields full of violet trees and
the haunting absence of Indians, which is more firmly lodged in my
consciousness than in the soil, were tall buildings of social housing built by
the Kirchner presidency.

President Nestor Kirchner has died and left his widow
in charge. The dead Kirchner (who maintained a silence about his Ashkenazi
Jewish origins while advocating a populism that aimed to be a more restrained
and intellectually calm ally of Chavismo in the north of the subcontinent) was
much more successful than his wife, Cristina Fernandez, possibly because he
died just before the inflation crisis that may have been caused by loans from
national banks to pay off the IMF, while he pretended to be a leftist defying
the latter.

In the previous decades some of Argentina’s Marxist
Montoneros decided to disguise their Marxist politics, and theories that common
people presumably would be unable to understand or sympathize with, such as
‘false consciousness’ and ‘commodity fetishism’, and reconcile themselves to a
right wing Peronist platform, simply known as Peronismo. Peronismo was the
predominant right wing popular movement against the bourgeois oligarchy that
ruled the country before Juan Domingo Peron’s ascendancy to power, in which he
introduced previously-unknown industrial worker’s rights and holidays, but
brutally persecuted anarchist and socialist dissent. (In part this personally
relates to my family's effaced geneology: my great grandfather Desimone was a
socialist and director of a music conservatory in Buenos Aires. He and his
cousin Justo had to burn down their library of left wing literature; Justo
Pantano was imprisoned for years in the southernmost arctic region of Ushuaia,
sentenced for his anarchist militancy.)

Many have tried to explain why a fascist populist
regime still concerned itself with worker’s rights, and many have found the
explanation lay at the door of Eva Peron, the saviour figure that ameliorated
and at times transmogrified the cruelty of Peron’s Justicialismo. The fact is
the winning of workers' rights has won Peron his oral hagiographies and aura of
sainthood among successive generations of working class Argentineans. Peron
allied himself with the 1930s fascism of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. During
the second world war he enforced anti-semitic policies such as denying entry to
Jews – but luckily, corruption saves lives and some Jews were able to enter
through customs with petty bribes, though most found no entry and returned to
their certain destruction if they were not able to succeed in finding another
place of refuge outside Europe.

The Italian and Spanish immigrants who came to
Argentina in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Spaniards
and Southern Italians who built much of the city of Buenos Aires, were more
often anarchists. But elite campaigns to re-educate the people destroyed any
memory of this fervour of solidarity with the Spanish and Greek civil wars.
Peron then came and popularized a tolerant and more reasonable kind of fascism.
This was how it came about that some Montoneros had decided that the lower
classes would support them if they presented their politics as Peronista.

Today’s
Peronistas

Today, the Peronistas present themselves as left-wing
revolutionaries, one of the Concert of Latin American Nations’ Socialisms of
the 21st century. They depict themselves as Marxist Guevarists or as
Indianists. But there is no intellectually Marxist elite any more hidden
underneath the fluffy socialist-populism: they are simply Peronistas. Abortion
is still illegal, the country is a debtor under the reign of banks, life gets
more expensive, crime and the drug addiction epidemic is tolerated in a way no mildly totalitarian socialist regime in Eastern Europe or in Cuba
would have ever allowed without oppressive redress.

Few in Argentina answer affirmatively to my question:
does Cristina Kirchner resemble another widow, Peron’s widow Isabela? No -
simply because Cristina Fernandez is a fierce politician, despite the
opposition elite media mocking her supposed lack of intelligence and bimbo-like
antics. She commands power and has many high-profile intellectual advocates
working for her. She is a multi-millionairess, and her ‘casas populares’,
popular democratic-assembly-offices for the poor are in every working class
district, showing her waving at the masses above a slogan like “Todos Con
Cristina,” “All with Cristina” - the sentimentality of an attempt to be Eva
Peron. Eva’s is the icon I was surprised to see on arrival, gracing the towers
in Mt Rushmore-like depictions of her effigy over the main boulevards of the
Buenos Aires city center, overlooking Callao and Avenida Santa Fe. I had thought
her central importance to Argentineans was a fiction made up in the film by
Madonna Ciccone.

It appears some of the widow’s policies and those of
her predecessor have made life more expensive. Argentineans proudly believed
Nestor K had cancelled the debt of the IMF, the debtocracy that strangled the
country ever since it was created by the military regime who took over by way
of a violent coup supported by the USA and its treasury department, borrowing
from the IMF and World Bank while it murdered its own citizens who would long
after the regime’s end be enslaved to repaying the same financial institutions
that had granted loans to the torturers and murderers so unscrupulously.

Nestor Kirchner in cancelling the debt seemed to take
a radical stance, one that I and most Latin Americans could only admire when
they were implemented in the first few years of the twenty-first century.

Before him, only Lenin had prevented the great
depression in western Europe from affecting Russia when he cancelled all debts to
western banks. But Kirchner was not the revolutionary he seemed; it appears now
- according to the opposition journalists of Periodismo Para Todos, that Kirchner cancelled the debt to the IMF
by paying it off with a loan he took from the central banks inside Argentina;
now there is a miniature crisis raising prices and inflation due to the
creeping interest rates caused by the new internal debt to local banks. People
were surprised: the ‘Socialism’ of the twenty-first century it seems is
proactive and respectful of the global financial system, it is not a reckless
maverick, but pays its debts and fills in all the appropriate application
forms. It is a tireless diplomat, non-violent and like all post-ideology, it is
conformist.

In the news, the criticism of Cristina Kirchner is to
my mind too focused on caricaturing her as a narcissistic woman, and one
directly involved and responsible for the violent crime waves. I worry this is
history repeating itself: after Peron died he left his second wife Isabela in charge;
Isabela was attacked in newspapers for her pre-marriage career as a burlesque
dancer, the middle class complaints accumulated and finally the gentlemen of
the Coup, the Latin-Nazi junta saw grounds to overthrow her and pretend to
apply “order” to the chaos of a country mismanaged by the prostitute widow of
the populist Peron. This was a country where an angry and selfish middle class
desperately wanted an answer to the so called “civil unrest” caused by
“subversivos”, by the young revolutionaries, the students fighting, the
so-called terrorism, the workers and peasants unions in solidarity with
Allende.

Well the gentlemen of the coup certainly established
order : they murdered at least 30,000 youths in secret dungeons and
concentration camps. According to the oral history I knew by heart, my one
piece of heritage, the only gift from my Argentinean relatives on visits to
Aruba where I was born and raised: they dragged them from their beds in the
night, they executed young intellectuals by torture or by pushing them out of aeroplanes throughout the late 70s and early 80s.

Now people of the opposition are interviewed on the
tv-stations, outraged at the escalation of violent crime in Argentina. They
attribute this magically to the current government, as if this admittedly
mediocre government had caused the rising rate of crime. They want vigilantes:
they want Batman. Reports of violent crime nowadays increasingly implicate the
government’s responsibility, not merely for not fixing the problem adequately,
but for not prosecuting criminals or even for organizing the criminals and
giving them freedom in exchange for votes. These allegations may arise partly
from middle class speculation, though there is no immediate reason to discredit
the claims.

Comparisons to the crisis of Chavism in Venezuela are
routine.

The elites in Venezuela similarly blamed the violent
crime rates on Chavez and Chavismo, saying that it was Chavez’ propaganda that
sowed class-hatred and class-envy among the poor. A girl who came to my exhibition
in Paris, a Venezuelan student in Paris presented me with the same view – there is
much for a Venezuelan elite child to fear, what with all the abductions and
kidnappings. I told her that the poor in Venezuela do not need any propaganda
other than their daily material reality to hate the old moneyed families of
Venezuela.

Cholera was only wiped out in the 1990s in poor areas
of Venezuela. The rich seem not merely to be a different class from the poor in
Venezuela, but a different species, resulting from a century of social
darwinism. Yet I reacted too harshly, as indeed Chavismo has persecuted those
who publicly speak of the rising crime rate. A young filmmaker of a popular
movie called Secuestro Express, about
a gang of delinquents from the ghetto who kidnap a spoiled elite couple for a
ransom from their old money parents, enjoyed success among both the elites and
lower classes for its depiction of the daily reality of the kidnapping
business. It was a thriller, and despite its mediocrity a good movie by Venezuelan
cinema standards; the government reaction was banning the film as a critique of
Chavismo. Chavez called the director Jonathan Jakubowitz "a Zionist Jewish
conspirator and persona non-grata", and exiled him.

Post-ideology

Yet for all the hype about Argentina being a wealthy
and Europeanized society, myths originating in the Porteños’ own delusions and in the progressive elite propaganda
of Europe, just outside Buenos Aires there are villages whose inhabitants still
live in huts and drive carriages drawn by mules, often lacking electricity or
plumbing. The Argentinean economy has become slightly xenophobic, with a
different exchange rate for non-Argentinean currency that has made expats and
travellers decide to avoid the country. (There is arguably a similar system to
the northern European or Dutch one in public transport, with special cards for
citizens and more expensive tariffs for foreigners, making the foreigners’
transit by comparison more onerous - though there is no comparison possible to
the northern European oppressive and intolerable xenophobia that has been throwing up Dutch and Danish expressions of ethnic democracy for some years of
the Euro Crisis now.)

One opposition journalist, La Nata, is popular with
the middle classes, and has inspired comic plays such as one I heard and felt
in the Teatro de Los Ciegos (sightless theater, intended for blind audiences
and devoted to dialogue, sound and water effects, a platform in which talented
though perhaps less attractive actors can triumph) loosely based on his
journalistic adventures and sex life. La Nata praised a recent demonstration of
250,000 people for its lack of any ideology, for its not having leaders or
clear organizational aims, as a sign of honesty and intelligence to contrast
with the government, which according to him resembles that of China (Maoist or
capitalist China? He did not specify which – probably he conflates the two as
despite the fact that people are crying out for an intelligent opposition to
the ruling class, La Nata is more like a shrill reactionary with a love for
punditry and hyperbole, despite some valid points buried somewhere in his
critique of the regime.) La Nata elsewhere can be a manipulative and shameless
hysteric, presenting his political views in the format of game shows with theme
songs, comedians with wigs impersonating the president in vulgar skits,
applause signs flashing and lottery prizes for specially lucky audience
members.

This is what is praiseworthy in the twenty-first
century: having no clear idea or political ideology, only basic consumer
priorities. This is the time for post-ideological mass demonstrations based on
the assumption that ideology is a violent mysticism that invariably leads
straight to totalitarianism. I think there is no age more vulnerable to
take-over by fascism and fascist revivals and returns of anti-Semitism than
this one of post-Ideology.

Football

This morning I watched a football programme. Here the
supposedly stupid people, the plebeiat, passionately discuss their opinions and
judgment on the games, the tensions between regions and provinces and working
class districts of the country. They know every aspect of football history and
every technical rule that I still fail to understand, proof I am only partly an
Argentine. If only they could wage the conversation on how society is
supposedly to look with the same passion, fiercely defending their opinions and
talking about party politics and ideology, instead of looking into the camera
of manipulative reporters asking the government or a new vigilanteist party to
please do something about the crime rate while lamenting the absence of a
vigilante, of a Batman.

There is certainly a crying need for a left wing or in
any case critical opposition, an alternative to populist official rule in all
the Latin American countries, that will be attractive to the poor as well as to
the middle classes and foreigners. Argentina is no exception.

The existing opposition is a movement of the middle class,
committed only to the identity politics of the middle class, their historic
contribution being negated by the ruling administration. Though their
grievances are often real and genuine, they are concerned mostly with their
class culture. When looting sprees of supermarkets erupted across the country,
in the much poorer and much more mestizo provinces of Argentina outside Buenos
Aires and major cities, the middle class conclusion, including among it its
self-proclaimed leftist commentators, was that all supermarket raids and
violence were directly organized by Kirchnerista hooligans who promise rewards
and more rights to the poor if they will commit crimes, galvanized by
‘punteros’ or middle-man gangsters operating between the halls of the Casa
Rosada and the criminal ghettoes where drugs are sold.

If prices are rising dramatically in Argentina -
though luckily not yet to French or Greek crisis proportions - is it not
natural to assume that the lower classes in the provinces are also suffering
and that lootings of supermarkets might spread by way of rumours and reports
across the countryside? The opposition intellectuals’ conclusion, that it is
strictly hirelings and provocateurs designed to intimidate the enemies of
Kirchnerite “Socialism” means this critique caters to the assumption that the
very poor cannot suffer as middle classes do from rising prices, as they are
benefiting from the copious parasitic welfare arrangements dropped on them from
the sky of populist heaven in return for their not working.

Recently protest against the trade in women that has
seen a few horrific instances of girls in the provincial slums or from Paraguay
being betrayed by people in their community who sold them to criminal
prostitution rings, did not stop at legitimately demanding the government to
act on the crimes: instead they operated on the assumption, to me not yet
proven, that the government directly hires pimps. This might be believable
in Argentina, where Carlos Menem, the president of Syrian origin before Nestor
Kirchner, went to prison for illegally selling weapons while he was president,
after he sold much of the country to foreign interests. Though one should not
be surprised if evidence arises of a ruling party official’s direct connections
to prostitution rings, it is surely conspiratorial and presumptuous to
immediately call for demonstrations based on such accusations.

The ruling party
and the opposition both claim to be the left wing: the ruling party is a mix of
novices – in the form of Cristina's newly acquired supporters and old-time
militant Montoneros turned to Kirchnerismo. The opposition try to
present themselves as the returning veteran leftists who had settled into their
middle class existence after their youthful days of reading Marx. It seems this
is a conflict between two right wings, both of them disguised as left wings
claiming the heritage of the face of Guevara, now reduced to the Disneyfied
status that effigy enjoys in western consumerist media.

About the author

Arturo Desimone is a writer and visual artist living between
Argentina and the Netherlands. His poems and short stories have appeared in literary journals
such as the New Orleans Review,
Jewrotica, Acentos Review, and in Sukoon,
the magazine of Arab-themed literature in English published from Dubai.

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